A mother Grizzly from Marblehead: the ursine image is an apt one. Clean air and water advocate Lori Ehrlich has no fangs and snarl, but she's fiercely effective in defending the health of her offspring--and the grateful citizens of Boston's North Shore.

• Author: Capone, Lisa

She helped launch two environmental organizations, and was pivotal in brokering the corporate cleanup of a decades-old, power-plant waste site. She led a grassroots delegation to Capitol Hill last year to protest President Bush's energy plan, provided environmental policy advice to the fledgling administration of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and has been named an "outstanding activist" of the year by a statewide environmental group.

But Lori Ehrlich, a 39-year-old mother of two from Marblehead, Mass., resists the label of "environmentalist." It's a pigeonhole she fears carries baggage that could thwart her goal of not just exposing environmental problems, but of quickly solving them.

Introducing herself at a March conference of Boston's Toxics Action Center (TAC)--held at Northeastern University--the soft-spoken accountant summed up the way she prefers to be known.

"My most important hat is that I am the mother of two daughters. They are the reason I caught this bug. I used to care about the environment. Now I'm obsessed," Ehrlich told her audience, before expounding on the public health dangers associated with coal-burning power plants--a subject on which she has become expert over the past five years.

"I hate the word 'activist,'" says Ehrlich, a founding board member of HealthLink, a Marblehead-based environmental watchdog group, and cofounder of the Wenham Lake Watershed Association (WLWA). "I like to think of myself as a mom looking out for the health of my children and my family."

Right. As in a mother grizzly defending her young--minus the bared fangs and snarl but with a quick mind, boundless energy, a knack for networking, and a winning smile. It's a combination that spells success, Ehrlich observers say.

"People from environmental groups spend far too much time sitting in rooms talking to one another. What I always appreciated about Lori and about HealthLink were the freshness they brought to their advocacy, and the groundedness of it," says Stephen H. Burrington, deputy chief of Commonwealth Development for Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and former general counsel at the Conservation Law Foundation. CLF has worked with HealthLink to push for more stringent power-plant emission regulations, and to compel PG&E to clean up unlined waste ponds at its two Massachusetts power plants, in Salem and Somerset.

The ponds were leaching arsenic and other heavy metals into groundwater near the plants, says CLF staff attorney Carol Lee Rawn, lead CLF counsel in the waste pond case. She adds that Ehrlich was a key player in helping to negotiate a September 2000 settlement under which PG&E avoided a lawsuit by agreeing to a $21 million cleanup.

"It's funny," Burrington adds. "Lori's an accountant, but she seems to take to advocacy like a fish takes to water. She's a natural."

E-mails at Midnight and a Crowded Calendar

Send Ehrlich an e-mail at midnight and chances are good that you'll get an immediate reply, claims her husband, Bruce Ehrlich.

"A lot of people realize there are a lot of problems and sit around and complain about them. Lori is definitely not like that. She's a doer, not a complainer," he says, referring to their "busy house," and how his wife "has gotten into a rhythm and somehow it works."

During a week at the height of this year's tax season, Ehrlich's busiest time professionally, she advised a reporter attempting to follow her around, "Wear sneakers--I move fast." She wasn't kidding.

Her first stop was at Boston's Coalition for an Environmentally Responsible Convention (the 2004 Democratic National Convention). Nursing the remnants of a bout with...